5 keyword mistakes burning your Instamart budget right now

Instamart advertising looks simple. Bid on keywords, show ads, get orders. But most brands are making the same five mistakes — and they don't even know it.

1. Bidding on your own brand name

You're already ranking #1 organically for your brand name. Bidding on it means you're paying for clicks you'd get for free. We see brands spend ₹5,000-15,000/month on branded keywords with zero incremental lift.

Fix: Pause all branded keyword campaigns. Monitor organic ranking for 2 weeks. If you're still #1, you just saved money.

2. Using broad match for everything

Instamart's broad match is broad. "Premium rice" will match "rice cooker," "rice plate," and sometimes just "premium." Your ad spend scatters across irrelevant searches.

Fix: Switch to exact match for your top 10 keywords. Use broad match only for discovery campaigns with strict daily budget caps (₹500 max).

3. Setting it and forgetting it

You launched a campaign 3 months ago. It's still running with the same bids, same keywords, same budget. Meanwhile, competitor bids have changed, seasonal patterns have shifted, and your best keywords last month might be duds this month.

Fix: Review campaigns weekly at minimum. Better yet, let an AI agent monitor daily.

4. Ignoring time-of-day performance

Instamart orders peak between 9-11am and 6-8pm. Ads running at 3am cost the same per click but convert at half the rate. You're paying full price for off-peak traffic.

Fix: Analyze your hourly conversion data. If you can set dayparting rules, concentrate budget on peak hours.

5. No negative keywords

Without negative keywords, your "organic dal" ad shows up for "organic shampoo" and "dal makhani recipe." Every irrelevant click is money wasted.

Fix: Check your search term reports weekly. Add irrelevant terms as negatives. Build a master negative keyword list for your category.

The common thread

All five mistakes share one root cause: nobody's watching. These problems are invisible unless someone — or something — monitors your campaigns daily.

That's exactly what Ladya does. She catches these mistakes in minutes, not months.